While You Are Sleeping

Matthew 24:36-44

November 28, 2004

St. Paul Church

Rev. John Fleming

I can still remember the scene, though it happened some eight or nine years ago. It happened on this Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent back in 1996 or 1997, I am not sure which. At the time, I was the pastor at my first church and on that Sunday I preached what I thought was a pretty good sermon. Looking back at old sermons is dangerous. When I do that, I often ask God to forgive me for saying such a thing to His children. I do not feel that way about sermons just preached, of course. And on this particular Sunday, I had just preached and we were in our newly constructed fellowship hall for a potluck lunch. The idea of a potluck, as you know, is that you empty the pot and you try your luck. Luck was not involved with the cooks at the Harmony Grove Church. Those people were great cooks. They also were personally offended if their preacher did not try what they had prepared. So I went home from those meals feeling like I would explode. I do not mind telling you that when I was appointed there I was fit and skinny. Four years later I was not.

It was on that Sunday, after the worship service and after the potluck meal when a few of us were gathered in the kitchen for the purpose of cleaning it up and putting the pots, pans, and plates away. There were four or five of us standing there after the work was done when the subject of my sermon came up. On the first Sunday of Advent, the lectionary asks us pastors to preach on the second coming of Jesus. I did that, that morning and now we were talking about it. Standing near the island in that kitchen was Margaree Garner. She was a saint in that church. One of my biggest supporters. Near the end of the conversation, she looked over at me and said, “I’m almost eighty-five years old. There are few Sundays in my eighty-five years that I have missed. I have heard sermons for all of my years about the second coming of Jesus.” She paused, looked at me, and said, “Brother John, do you think that it will ever happen?”

Serious and not so serious minded Christians have been asking that same question for years now. Hundreds of predictions about when it would happen have been made and every one of them has been wrong. Which, you would think, would discourage future predictions. It has not. Still they come, especially at the turn of centuries and when wars happen. You hear about the second coming of Jesus not only out there in the world. You also hear it here, inside the church, once a month, when we celebrate Holy Communion. As a part of the service, we say, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” We also hear it as a part of our scripture lesson for this morning from Matthew’s gospel, his twenty-fourth chapter. Commentators have come to call this chapter a little apocalypse. Jesus’ words in this chapter are necessitated by his prediction of the destruction of the temple. Earlier in the chapter, the twelve turned to him and said, “Tell us when this will be and what sign what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” So it is everywhere. It is out there in the world. It is in our communion liturgy and it is in our scripture lesson for this morning.

There is no getting away from it, but there is also no real reason to lose sleep over it, either. Christ has been coming back for so long that many people have given up on Him. You will remember this from your study of the Bible that before He left, Jesus said that he would be right back, as if he were going out for a cup of coffee. His disciples, of course, believed him. Why would you not believe him? Because they did, they did not make long range plans. For a while, they cowered in fear, in a room in Jerusalem. Then they did do something, but still planned on the end. We have been studying Paul’s letters this fall in Disciple Bible Study and in the Transitions Sunday School Class. You will probably remember that all of Paul’s letters were written with the end in mind. Paul believed that Jesus would return during his lifetime. He preached that and wrote about that to the churches that he led. But it did not happen in Paul’s lifetime or in the lifetime of the church he corresponded with. A year passed and then several more years. The people who had known Jesus personally were beginning to die. The stories of Jesus were then being told by people who knew people who had known Jesus.

The world had been holding on for a long time. And as you know, you can only hold on for so long. After a while, your hands get tired. You can live on your tiptoes for only so long. After a while, your leg muscles get tired. You can watch only for so long, after a while, your eyes have to focus on something else. I have not seen it, but I have heard of the bumper sticker that reads, “Jesus is coming soon. Look busy!” This problem of Jesus coming or not coming has been around for a long time. There were those who lived a long time ago who had the courage to think, “Maybe Jesus isn’t coming back as quickly as I thought he would!” One of those persons was Matthew, the tax collector, one of Jesus’ disciples. I am sure that he thought this, “Maybe I ought to write some of these stories down.” He did that, some forty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.

In his gospel, Matthew had a lot to do. He had to tell the story of Jesus from his perspective and he had to explain what had happened to Jesus to a group of people who wanted to know where he was, if this was a part of the plan, or if something bad had happened to him. Just before we arrive at our lesson for this morning, Matthew has Jesus saying, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” These things are the things that he has already mentioned in the chapter, things like wars, rumors of wars, false prophets prophesying, nations rising against nations, famines, earthquakes, trumpets blaring, the sun turning dark, and stars falling out of heaven. With these words just out of his mouth, Jesus says, “But about that day and hour, no one really knows, not the angels, not the Son, only the Father.” My guess is that that is the best that Matthew could do on the subject. He has Jesus coming back, but only God knows when. He could not resolve the tension and the question of when it would happen. So instead Matthew tells us what Jesus said to do while we wait. These are his words, “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

Bryan and I talked about this the other day, at our weekly meeting. I asked him what he would preach if he were doing that this morning. Bryan is wise. I respect his counsel and advice. He said (and I agree with him) that there is a problem with the season of Advent. We think about the first coming, Jesus being born in a manger in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph, as if he has never been here. And we think about the second coming of Jesus as if He has left us. What we really believe, friends, is that Jesus has always been a part of our lives. He has never left us. We believe that He is always with us. He is in the one sitting beside us in the pew. He is in the call of concern. He is in the fellowship of a friend. He is in the meal being brought over when something has happened. He is in the strange feeling in our heart of something that is beyond us, that is stronger than us, that is looking for something more.

Back to the lesson. According to Matthew, what is laughable about the coming again scenario is that it will happen when everyone is wide awake and ready. That is crazy, isn’t it? After all, a night watchman does not need nudging if he is wide awake. Matthew was afraid, you see, that the church, forty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, was nodding off. It is comical, I think, to believe that God’s time and our time are the same time. You see, us and God aren’t using the same calendar with the same holidays with the same birthdays marked on them. Barbara Brown Taylor, the great preacher and pastor said this, “{knowing when the second coming of Jesus is} ...is as laughable as a thief giving you a call first to see when might be a good time to break into your house.” His coming again, says Jesus, will be like a thief breaking into your house in the middle of the night, wearing maybe a stocking cap on his head, dark clothes on his body, and tiptoeing around so that no one will wake up until he is standing over your bed.

Now I have not had the experience of someone breaking into any of the houses that I have lived in. I know that some of you have. The closest that I have come is that I came home from the church one afternoon. Susie and Annie Grace were already home. I said hello and then quickly changed into more comfortable clothes so that I could mow the yard. I went out to the carport where the lawnmower lived. It was not there. I asked Susie where it was, as if she had it in the backyard finishing up the mowing. That is funny because since we moved to Little Rock in 1998, Susie has not mowed our yards. When she told me that she did not know where it was, I put two and two together. Some one had come to my house in broad daylight, pulled their truck into my carport, loaded up my lawnmower, and drove away. Some of you have had your homes broken into. Some of you have come home with the backdoor standing wide open or perhaps kicked in. You have been scared to walk inside, but when you do, you notice that some of your things are missing. But more importantly than that, the place where you feel the most comfortable and safe suddenly does not feel that way anymore. So, friends, I am not so sure that I like Jesus coming like this. I understand it, but I do not like it.

I think that I would like to do this, this morning. Let us take a scene or two out of our lives. Let’s try this, to see if it fits. It may not fit perfectly, but my guess is that parts of it will. We live our lives in the daytime with its demands and duties. There are people around and because they are, we put on a good show. We would not want anyone to know what our lives are really like. So we do things like teach school, pastor churches, and sell insurance. We take care of children or a spouse. We rush from one thing to another. We make it to lunch appointments on time. We come home when supper is on the table. Maybe it is rowdy when you get home. A preacher tells that the best way to describe his coming home is the pirana hour. He says that it is the time when everyone wants to take a bite out of him. You come home. Your daughter wants to tell you what happened at school. Your dogs want to be fed. The message light on the answering machine blinks like there is no tomorrow. Mail is taken out of the box and seen about. Supper is soon on the table and soon the kids are in bed and the evening is gone. There were things that you wanted to do with the evening, but the opportunity has now passed. If you are like me, then maybe you have fallen asleep on the couch. I tend to do that. You wake up with a crick in your neck. It is late. Everyone else is asleep. You get up, turn off the television and the lights. You let the dogs out one last time. It is dark. There is no other sound in the house. Now is when you should listen and look for the thief, friends. If you were expecting him, he might not come. All that you are expecting is a few uneventful hours of sleep. Because that is all that you are expecting, it is the perfect time for Jesus to come. You see, your defenses are down. Somehow he slipped past the security system, your dog, and the boundaries and walls that you have put up to keep everyone, including Jesus, at a safe distance. This is when the thief is the most likely to come. He is there not to take things away from you, like your new laptop computer or the jewelry. This thief is there to give you things. Things like peace, hope, confidence, and a sense that you are not as alone as you think you are. He is there to help with the things that we think that we have to protect, the things that we are holding on to for dear life. I hope that you do not mind His intrusion. Now, all this talk about the second coming of Christ is important, but not as important, it seems to me, as letting Jesus be a part of your life everyday. You need to know that this Jesus is sneaky. He will find a way into your heart. Keep awake. Pay attention. Let Him into your hearts. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to Margaree Garner for her question of when I thought Jesus would return. Thanks to Thomas Long for an idea or two in this sermon. Thanks to Barbara Brown Taylor. Many of the ideas of this sermon come from a sermon that she preached on this text. I am indebted to her for helping me especially with the idea of Jesus as the one who comes as a thief).